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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23214748">you aren't as brave as you were</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/VeteranKlaus/pseuds/VeteranKlaus'>VeteranKlaus</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Umbrella Academy (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Implied/Referenced Past Rape</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 10:22:50</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,885</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23214748</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/VeteranKlaus/pseuds/VeteranKlaus</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It is twenty-seven days after Dave died in front of him, and there is a needle in Klaus' trembling hands.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>104</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>you aren't as brave as you were</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Whoops my hand slipped<br/>Check the tags please there's only 4 &lt;3</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Klaus is stubborn, but he isn't sure he'd call himself determined. Stubborn in his own ways, he hates other people prying their way into his life and trying to change it. He thinks that stubbornness is born from the need to have some form of consistency despite the fact that his life is unpredictable and wild. He doesn't know what will happen from one minute to the next, but he knows what to expect. Drugs, sex, or violence. Cold and hunger on the streets until he reaches the heat and flashing lights of a club. Dark nights, sitting opposite a lamppost. The clang of his hand hitting against the inside of a dumpster as he reaches for what looks like food still in a wrapper. Heavy breathing, cheering, yelling. Fleeting sensations that are gone in moments and that he hardly acknowledges but recognises faintly. </p><p>And people come into his organised mess of a life and try to change it. Their insistence and perseverance is irritating and though he isn't determined to stay on the path he is on, he is stubborn not to let anyone change it, because fuck them, really.</p><p>But he tries, this time. After the apocalypse, after he could make Ben corporeal, after Vietnam, after Dave.</p><p>Klaus loves Ben. Really, he does. He is both his favourite and least favourite sibling. But it is Dave who Klaus loves the most, and if Dave had never been then Klaus would have no reason to get sober; not his family, not the Apocalypse, not Ben. </p><p>But Dave had been, and Klaus gets sober. It works, kind of. Ben has spoken to their siblings with his own mouth rather than Klaus' now multiple times. They believe him about Ben. They believe that he's sober. They might be beginning to believe he isn't so worthless anymore. Every so often, though, there will be an argument, and Klaus will open his mouth and there will be a passing, fleeting comment, a harsh retort. They don't mean it, and more often than not there will be an apology after it. Sometimes. </p><p>Klaus doesn't blame them. Nearly two-decades worth of lying and stealing and drugs doesn't build a very reliable or trustworthy self-image. But he's trying, and sometimes that is acknowledged. He even eats three meals a day, with his siblings, sat in their childhood chairs at the dining table. He congratulates Vanya on not blowing anyone up for the twenty-fifth day in a row; listens to Diego ponder the possibility of giving the police academy a second chance; watches Five's eyes bounce between every possible entrance and exit in a room before he sits down, bringing his entourage of bloody corpses with him.</p><p>There are a lot of ghosts in the academy on a normal day. A lot more ghosts in the academy when the academy is full of his murderer-siblings, too. And himself, of course. He can't forget the Vietnamese ghosts that follow him around. It's a shame he knows Vietnamese. If he didn't, he might be able to convince himself they aren't begging for him not to pull the trigger that he did.</p><p>Well, he thinks, it is impossible to be a Hargreeves and not be a murderer, too. The things go hand in hand, except for Pogo, who is simply an accomplice to child abuse. Does Grace count? If you were to ask Diego, he would say yes - or, not in that context, but with the idea that Grace is sentient and therefore aware of what she stood by and allowed Reginald and Pogo to do. If you were to ask Luther, he would say no. Klaus isn't sure himself. </p><p>The point is, he is trying, despite the way the academy is bustling with loud corpses and siblings all full of trauma and unsure of how to process it or cope with it in a healthy way. The academy is decidedly lacking one thing; Dave.</p><p>He tries to find him, of course. He tries every day, for the majority of the day. He does whatever he can think of to make a ghost appear, but he never comes. Sometimes, sometimes, he thinks he might be near. He sees something flutter in his peripheral, he hears a familiar whistling tune, the heavy footsteps of boots caked in mud, a honey-rich laugh on the wind. So close but never close enough. It drives him nearly mad.</p><p>It has been twenty-seven days since Dave died. Klaus doesn't need to count; he simply knows, because each day is not a new one; it is another day after Dave. The day after his death, the second day after his death, the third day, the fourth, the fifth. Now it is the twenty-seventh. Not a Thursday, or whatever day it might be, but the twenty-seventh day after he watched Dave die beside him. </p><p>If he could be bothered making his mind work, he could probably think up the hours, and the minutes, too. But he has no motivation for that.</p><p>The twenty-seventh day after Dave goes pretty much the same as the other twenty-six, minus the few days that didn't during the lead up to the apocalypse. He wakes up after a restless sleep where the jungle grows into stone and the Vietnamese ghosts turn into English ones and he turns into a thirteen year old backed into the corner of a crypt. He feels like shit, and he stares out of the window for twenty minutes. He changes into clothes that don't smell horrible, he drags himself downstairs and eats breakfast and makes stupid comments that don't make sense just to interrupt his siblings conversation. He eats lunch, and dinner, and snacks in between sometimes. He wanders aimlessly. Smokes in the courtyard. Stares at the sky. He hears the clink of a class as Five pours himself a drink from the bar in the living room – and no one says anything. Klaus started drinking younger than Five, in both consciousness and body.</p><p>He longs for alcohol. Itches for it. His fingernails – short, bitten unevenly, with cracking black nail polish on them – scratch along the dining table in front of him, and then along the pale expanse of his forearms. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Ben is somewhere. He doesn’t know where. Probably reading, or watching the sun set, if it is that time. He isn’t sure what time it is. It is at night with the moon shining in through windows Reginald only just put bars on because he shattered them the last time he took him to the mausoleum, and it is evening in ‘Nam and his belly is warm and full from the food from a pub, and it is – sometime in the present. He doesn’t care about now, though.</p><p>He has to keep rubbing his hands against his thighs. They feel hot and sticky with blood, with Dave’s blood, and though he looks down and he doesn’t see it he can <em>feel</em> it, and so he keeps trying to rub it off and onto his pants instead, tries to rid the feeling from his skin. Five eyes him when he continues to do it, but he can’t stop, so he doesn’t. Klaus being Klaus, and all that.</p><p>When he closes his eyes, he can hear it, too. Hear the sound of Dave choking on his own blood as it bubbles up his throat and spills from the corner of his lip, deafening even over the sound of gunshots and yelling and explosions all around him, with choppers flying overhead and whipping up a tornado. He can hear the wheeze when he inhales, the gurgle with the exhales, the rattle when he chokes and coughs. He can hear his heart beneath his ear, echoing throughout his skeleton and into Klaus’ ears as he presses it to his chest, just right of the gaping wound that he is attempting to cover with his own hands pathetically. He can feel blood drip down his forearms as someone grabs the back of his jacket, the collar balling up in their fist, and <em>Dave is gone, Klaus, he’s gone, come on! We need to go! </em>And Dave getting so far away, and Klaus can still save him, he digs his heels into the dirt and he flails his arms and he screams for Dave, but he is suddenly gone, gone, gone, but Klaus can <em>still</em> make it better, so he grabs his briefcase with bloody hands and opens it and – and –</p><p>He is in the academy. He wipes bloody-not-bloody hands down his thighs. Blinks away tears and scrubs them off his cheeks, shakes them off his hands.</p><p>Dave is dead. Thing is, it doesn’t overly matter if he is dead; not to Klaus. What matters is that he’s gone. Dave is gone and he is never coming back.</p><p>Klaus doesn’t know where his siblings are. Five is no longer in the living room, Ben is still gone. Luther, Allison and Vanya are less notorious to Klaus; they have their own lives that Klaus is less significant in. Diego, he doesn’t know where he is, either. Hasn’t seen him all day, actually.</p><p>He is so tired. Between the ghosts and the nightmares and the flashbacks and exhausting himself trying to conjure Dave, he has hardly slept. He just wants a break; wants some rest, some peace, some bliss. Wants to forget he is alive and real; wants the world to crumble into ash and dust and nothingness around him.</p><p>Twenty-seven days. He thinks it might be a record, honestly.</p><p>Klaus was never very good at keeping records.</p><p>He stands up, and his feet drag on the floor as they carry him outside. He smokes, because his muscles remember how to do that and the burn in his lungs and his fingertips when it burns low is satisfying. He needs the burn, and the fresh air, and the change of scenery even if the scenery keeps fucking changing and he can’t make it stop, can’t distinguish between skyscrapers and jungle trees and tombstones. He just – he needs it to stop.</p><p>Pogo started giving him his allowance again. Smaller amounts, of course. To try and dissuade him from what he’s about to do. But Klaus is smart, smarter than people think, and he knows every crevice in that damn academy, knows how to find money, and he has enough. Enough for just one pause, and it’s all he wants.</p><p>He fishes his money out; hands it over to one man. Fishes the remainder out and hands it down to another a street down. Goes into a bar and steals a clean spoon from a tray when no one is looking. He has always been good at picking things up swiftly, subtly, and there is no way anyone is going to stop him from this. He has his lighter, he doesn’t need to steal or buy one.</p><p>Something begins to unwind in his chest. This routine, this little dance he does; weaving in amongst people, a hand dashing out here, out there, to pick up what he needs when no one is looking, with pockets devoid of money, the weight of escape heavy and grounding like an anchor tucked inside his clothes; it is comforting. His body knows everything will be okay soon. All he needs now is a place to set up, to get comfortable.</p><p>There isn’t comfort on the streets, and he doesn’t want to see the academy around him. So he settles on the next best thing; he gets on his hands and knees and crawls through the tear in a fence, scurries around the back of an abandoned building and climbs through the gap in wooden slats nailed over a window. The smell of death and drugs and piss hits him like the smell of home, and the sound of unsteady stairs groaning beneath his feet is welcoming. The sounds of moaning from the living is a welcome change from the moans of the dead.</p><p>He finds a corner devoid of any junkie off their face, devoid of piss or trash, and so he settles down in it, tugs off his belt to tie around his arm instead. He uses his teeth to tighten it until his veins pop and he almost feels high already.</p><p>He was never a huge heroin user. Probably did it enough times to be called a heroin addict, but compared to what else he did, it might as well be nothing. He preferred things that made things happy. Made things fast. Made his heart beat, and made him feel confident, and made him love people. He’s always been sociable. He would rather snort line after line of coke and melt the day away and dance the night away and run from his problems – always a coward – and he could run from anxiety, from hunger, from homelessness, from ghosts, from the academy; from everything. Heroin was when he hit his lows; the night he first fucked someone for money and wanted to hide from how pathetic he was, the night he learned that <em>no</em> didn’t always matter to the kind of people he hung out with, the night Ben died – and the many nights after, because he could see the outline of Ben’s intestines spilling out on coke but his brother wasn’t strong enough, in the beginning, to come through to him on heroin – and the last night Diego shoved him out of his door, yelling at him, and a few nights sprinkled here and there when he couldn’t keep running from it all and needed to collapse, needed to reset himself.</p><p>It is a sweet reprieve from life. It’d be sweeter with coke mixed in, but he doesn’t have that so he’ll have to settle for this. It burns as he holds a lighter under the spoon it is in to cook it, and it bubbles thickly and steam coils off it like poison. It smells like the rest of the building he is in. It slides slowly into the syringe, slower than usual because he is careful, and precise, needs to take his time because he has to keep blinking tears from his vision and needs to keep reminding himself to breathe and his hands keep shaking.</p><p>It feels like guilt in his hands. He stares at it, at the glint on the metal needle, at the liquid in the syringe staring back up at him. Dave could be right there, on the opposite side of some impenetrable wall. He could be chipping away at it, could be one more try away from reaching Dave. Klaus could set the needle down, could stamp on it and shatter it, or could even fucking give it away and be like Santa to any of the half-dead addicts around him. He could go home, talk to Ben, or Diego, or Allison, even, or he could simply cry it out in his bed and fall asleep (and have nightmares and jolt awake) and restart the day and keep trying.</p><p>But he doesn’t want to. He forces himself to be selfish, and it isn’t hard because it is the thing he is best at doing, and tells himself resolutely that Dave is not coming back, he cannot get over or under or around or through the wall separating them, or that Dave is simply gone, ceased to exist in any kind of form, and if that is the case then there truly is no point in trying anymore.</p><p>Klaus has always been better at being selfish and ruining his life than he has at doing a single good thing with himself. Until Dave. Dave was something good; found something good in Klaus and his despicable ways, even when Klaus tried to scare him away in the beginning.</p><p>But Dave is gone, and so is everything good, then, and so is the good in Klaus.</p><p>He inhales, blinks up at the cracked ceiling over his head, and then he looks down. Lines the needle up with a vein that has risen eagerly to greet it, and then he slides the needle in and just holds it there for a moment, careful, so careful. The pinch makes him hold his breath in anticipation. His body lurches, his heart skips a beat, oh so excited. And so he pushes down on the plunger and keeps pushing until the syringe is empty, and then he tears it out, only his hand is oh so heavy and he tugs it out in a loose grip.</p><p>A freight train hits him. His lips part and expel the air he was holding hostage in his lungs and his eyes go wide and blind for a moment, incapable of processing the sight of the world around him. His body hits the wall limp beside him and he doesn’t feel it. He soars a hundred miles above the building, lays on the bottom of the ocean and feels waves run through him, an endless expanse of oblivion around him, and it is quiet, and full of nothingness, and nothing exists and nor does he.</p><p>He lets it take him away, away from the voice calling his name in the distance that sounds like Dave’s if he doesn’t pay attention to it, and Ben’s if he does.</p>
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